Princeton University, PhD '95

BIOGRAPHY

Jane Dailey is Professor of History, the College, and the Law School at the University of Chicago.  

I received my BA degree from Yale University in 1987, and my Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1995.  I am the author or editor of five books, including two monographs and a single-authored narrative textbook of U.S. history, Building the American Republic, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.  I am currently at work on a book directed at a general audience tentatively entitled Lessons in Democracy from the American South.  This book acknowledges the existence of (sometimes fleeting) instances of interracial democracy in the post-Civil War South and connects that story with a broader discussion of the course of liberal and anti-liberal politics in the United States through the present.  I am also engaged in more scholarly pursuits, such as the promise and peril of political patronage systems in the U.S.

 My work circles around questions of race and politics. My first book, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), analyzed the conditions that facilitated and, ultimately, undid interracial democracy in the post–Civil War South. An edited collection, Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, 2000), continued the theme of African American resistance to white domination from Reconstruction through the 1950s. A third book, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Documentary History (Norton, 2008), examines the creation and dissolution of legal segregation in America through primary sources.

I have received generous outside support for my work from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin (where I was a Berlin Prize Fellow), the Alphonse Fletcher Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which awarded me a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004.  

My most recent book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History (Basic Books, 2020), was widely reviewed and nominated for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize.  Stretching from emancipation to the present, White Fright draws on a range of previously untapped sources as well as a rich secondary literature to show how the African American freedom struggle was articulated around a white resistance that was explicitly and thoroughly sexualized. Delving deeply into that resistance, the book challenges civil rights orthodoxy in numerous ways. 

My teaching interests align with my scholarly work.  In addition to various graduate seminars, I teach many undergraduate courses including the history of the American South and survey of the United States since 1920.  I also teach legally-inflected US history at the University of Chicago Law School.